Gary Bauer: The Redistricting Wars

Texas Democrats are really proud of themselves for fleeing their state to prevent the passage of a new congressional redistricting plan. They should be ashamed of themselves instead.
 
By preventing a quorum, they have essentially shut down the legislature. But redistricting wasn’t the only item on the lawmakers’ agenda.
 
Among the 18 critical issues Gov. Abbott asked the special session to address was legislation improving emergency flood warning systems and providing financial relief to help the victims of the deadly July 4th floods.
 
Texas Democrat legislators are willing to hurt their fellow Texans for partisan political gain. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott isn’t backing down. He is initiating a process to remove the Democrat deserters from office for dereliction of their duties.
 
Predictably, the Left’s rhetoric on the redistricting dispute is completely incompatible with a peaceful civil society. One Texas Democrat legislator actually compared the redistricting fight to the Holocaust. Virtually all of them are saying this is a “war.”
 
There is irony in where these Texas Democrats chose to go. Some went to Massachusetts, where their party has so gerrymandered the state that there are no Republicans—not one—in the Massachusetts congressional delegation.
 
Other Democrats went to New York. Last year, Albany Democrats rejected a map drawn by an independent commission and rammed through their own gerrymandered map.
 
Other Texas Democrat legislators went to Illinois, where Gov. J. B. Pritzker, who wants to be the Democrat nominee for president in 2028, is the king of gerrymandering. Donald Trump got 45% of the vote in Illinois, but Republicans have just 18% of the state’s congressional seats because of overt gerrymandering.
 
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley looked at more than a dozen Democrat states across the country. He found that Republicans got 43% of the vote in those states but have only 22% of the congressional seats.
 
That’s what Democrats have done with redistricting. There was no screaming about “threats to our democracy.” And, I might add, Republicans did very little about it to respond in kind. Hats off to Gov. Ron DeSantis for being a Republican who fought back.
 
But because Republicans previously didn’t make a big stink over the Democrat radical manipulation of congressional district lines, the media and the Left are claiming that what Texas is doing is an unprovoked GOP “attack on democracy.”  
 
Meanwhile, I lost count this week of the number of Democrats who said, “This is war.” Or “We’re bringing a gun to the knife fight.” Or “The dictator Trump is threatening our democracy.”
 
This kind of extreme rhetoric from the Left on virtually every single issue is the real threat to our country’s ability to survive. Democrats are doing it constantly, and they are doing it intentionally because they have nothing else to offer.